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self-awareness

Life is full. We make choices each day to prioritize our time and energy. Our choices are affected by our energetic state when we make the choice. If we are distracted, depleted or in a hurry we tend to make choices that further the sense of exhaustion or create an inner-dialog of self-judgment.

We don’t often consider how much we are being influenced by the world around us. We have bits and pieces of other people’s needs influencing the amount of energy we have for our life. Past encounters such as the person we accidentally cut off in traffic who blared their horn at us, and future expectations such as the pile of clothes to put away or the call to return, subtly drain our energy.

It’s challenging to make room for what we want in our life. We increase our odds by regularly cleaning out our energy field to insure we are choosing from a powerful place. Then our choices lead to creating what we want rather than self-criticism.

To clean and reclaim your energy field, follow this simple visualization. Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and see yourself as grounded (connected with a link of energy from the tip of your tailbone to the center of the Earth).

Now imagine a rose in front of you. Its job is to clean out the energies in your aura that are not serving you or clouding your choices, small and large. Intend that the bits of attention still on you from any people you’ve interacted with or had thoughts about are drawn-out of your body and into the rose. This may take a few minutes.

Watch as the energy leaves, specifically from anyone with whom you feel there is something unresolved. Also ask that the energy be cleared out information you’ve seen on the news.

Once you feel the energy from others and what is happening in the world has been cleaned out, see the negative thoughts and emotions you have put upon yourself be drawn out of your aura and into the rose. These can be emotions such as self-judgment, disappointment, frustration or shame.

When you feel complete, imagine the blossom of the rose is surrounded by a bubble that lifts it up high in the sky so it floats off to a very faraway place. Then see the rose evaporate and the energy recycle in a neutral fashion.

Before you are done, take a moment to fill your aura in with your own energy and a vibration you would like more of in your life. Imagine a big magnetic funnel above your head drawing your energy to it from any person or place you’ve had attention on. Add to that funnel a hefty dose of the energy you would like more of such as, creativity, peace, clarity, inspiration, courage or happiness. Then see the funnel fill your body up through the top of your head, overflowing once full to coat your entire aura with this positive energy.

I write to you while traveling in New Zealand. Exploring another culture I’m always curious about the soul of the people. The Maori (indigenous New Zealanders) have a term “turangawaewae” to express what all humans desire but few languages have a word for, the sense that our life is purposeful, fulfilling and that we have a place to stand.

I learned about turangawaewae when reading the story of a local painter and outdoor enthusiast. She takees multi-month kayaking journeys along the shores of New Zealand and paints what she sees in these remote parts of the coastline. In combining these two passions she she’d found her turangawaewae, her place to stand. The concept is defined as, “places where we feel especially empowered and connected… our foundation, our place in the world, our home.”

Finding one’s turangawaewae is a challenge for the majority of people I know. Even those with a clear and early artistic expression, talent or passion often struggle with feeling at peace creating space for it in their lives. Society conditions us that our purpose should be actualized in a job, financial pressures take priority over life balance, and we generally don’t receive any guidance from family, school or society regarding discovery of places we feel empowered and connected. We desire turangawaewae but don’t have a word for it in the English language or guidance to discover it.

If turangawaewae came easy maybe we wouldn’t value it or as someone once said, if you see a path ahead of you and each step to take, know that it’s not your path. It’s someone elses path. Your path only gets revealed one moment at a time, one choice at a time, as you live it. Suddenly you realize you’ve arrived somewhere even if you didn’t see that your experiences were adding up to somthing. You know its your turangawaewae because you’re at peace for longer periods of time, feeling empowered and on solid ground.

As I look back at my own journey to turangawaewae it was never a clear path. I was always curious about the spiritual world, what is unseen in the universe. From as early as I can remember I felt a deep sense of fulfillment from writing. As a young girl some of my sweetest memories are of writing poetry and prose among the grass and daffodils in our front pasture. But I often struggled with how these aspects of myself fit into what I was creating with my life and purpose.

I was attracted to self-reflect and heal incongruencies in my heart and mind as a teenager. This led me on a path of working with many spiritual, physical and psychological healing modalities. Then in my late 20’s I made a choice to learn healthier boundaries around my psychic experience, not even knowing how to define it at the time. I started clairvoyant training to help myself translate what I was experiencing and feel more at peace when in the the presence of others who were suffering.

Throughout my life I unconsciously empathically felt the energy or emotions of people around me. I often didn’t know when I felt bad that what I was absorbing or responding to in someone around me. For example, if I worked with a person who was depressed or angry, it would drain my energy.

For seven years off-and-on I took classes and regularly applied the tools for myself, becoming more and more clear on what I felt and what I was sensing around me. Feeling less and less drained or “off” from the energy of those I encountered. Eventually I was inspired to take the full clairvoyant certification training, again not planning to do something with it beyond using the knowledge to inform my own life experience and vanquish lingering doubts I had regarding my intuition.

The program had both a training and practicum component. Learning the tools, then applying them with other students or those who came to the school for student readings. I also began to share what I learned with friends outside of the classroom. I found it exceptionally fulfilling at the end of each reading to have shared what I had to offer to another soul as they were looking within to find more peace in their life.

In parallel I had been writing in the format of a personal blog for years when I found I was writing about self-reflective concepts, my passion for the soul’s experience and intuition. Combining these two expressions has brought me a deeper sense of inner-peace and fulfillment. Now over nearly 15 years after starting down the path of clairvoyant training and many more years of writing, I feel I have I had found my turangawaewae, the place where I feel the most purpose, empowered and connected both with my own essense and with others.

You might think your family didn’t teach you much about your intuition but they did. Whether they taught you to doubt your gut feelings by telling you that you were wrong when you voiced something you sensed but couldn’t prove, or they simply were living examples of listening to their inner-voice; they taught you something.

One way I was taught to tune-in to my intuition by my family was through working with my dad on the ranch. There were always projects to do. The list was never ending with land, livestock, buildings, fences and equipment to keep in order. Dad would often have me and my brother help him when he was working on a project. He did most of the heavy lifting and our job was to keep him in his efficiency-zone by handing him whatever tool he needed next, holding a board in place or plugging in a power tool.

While he taught us how to do things along the way and verbally asked us to hand him the next tool or piece of material he needed early on, over time we were expected to know what he needed next, to read his mind and be one step ahead of him as he worked. This was also the way his dad, our grandfather worked. My brother and I learned to either be savvy enough to know what was next in the project or intuit their next step.

We were experiencing non-verbal communication. As the helpers we tuned-in to what was happening and kept track of the fast pace that activity was moving. We not only were tuned-in to whether a next tool was needed but if it was time to get dad a drink of water.

Practicing awareness of another through observation and intuitively tuning-in to foresee what they may need next was one of the languages of our family. In the full throws of a project if we weren’t tuned-in it could mean someone got hurt or the rhythm or efficiency was broken. It also insured we didn’t get scolded for being lazy and not doing our part.

Reading or empathically feeling others emotions and translating that into what to do for them is one of the tricky areas where we can either be affirmed or taught to doubt ourselves in a family. The nice thing about intuiting the material next steps of a ranch project is that it not as dicey of ground as intuiting someone’s emotions and knowing how to respond.

Our families subtly teach us how to use or disregard our intuition. As we identify some of the ways this occurred in our life, we can use it to reclaim or further hone our intuitive awareness.

There is subtleness in how we wait for things in our lives. We imagine one thing needs to happen before the next can occur, believing life experiences naturally come in a certain order, so we wait. This needs to happen before that. We need to have a certain amount of money, a relationship, a certain type of job or children out of the house, to create our dream.

I have a picture of myself living in a home I’ve designed and built with a partner in the countryside. With creek that runs through it, trees, and of course a beautiful view that makes us take a deep breath every time we look out the window. I had been waiting for someone to co-create this vision with but waiting was attracting more waiting. I wasn’t creating my heart’s desire and it was impacting every day of my life.

Sometimes we are so close to our own view of the world that we can’t see where it’s holding us back. It hadn’t dawned on me that in waiting for a partner to have this life in the countryside I was denying myself happiness. I finally was able to see that I was waiting in a way that had me stuck and attracting more waiting.

I’ve felt the call for several years now to leave the city and live closer to nature. Having grown up in the country and a small town, I never really saw myself as a city person when I moved to Denver 23 years ago. I got used to it and even enjoy it a lot. Still I’ve always known that my proverbial cup is filled by being in nature and as it stands now it’s somewhere I have to go to rather than the place where live.

A story I’ve been telling myself and others for years, is that I want to live the summer months in Oregon on or near my family’s ranch, and be in Colorado for the rest of the year. The catch was that my “picture” of this life required a partner. I am single, and waiting for the partner who wanted this life and could have it had been blocking me from creating the life I really want.

Last week I asked management at my technology job if I could live and work from Oregon for 3-4 months this summer. He said, “No problem. I don’t care where you work from. You work from home as it is.” While I work from home, I travel a lot for that job and moving will impact the distance/cost of my travel for work. Having received this “Yes” I feel excited and surprised at the courage I see is needed to take this step.

As the reality of this creation set-in, I began to feel a new sense of freedom. I have stopped waiting for things to look a certain way and am creating what I want in my life. There’s not a story but a real experience I’m participating in.

The law of attraction is at work. Because I had been waiting rather than creating, I was attracting more opportunities to wait rather than create and felt stuck in past creations that were great but I’d outgrown. Now that I’ve said yes to creating this vision, synchronicities continue to show up to support it coming to fruition.

What are you waiting for? Start creating and see what shows up to support your creation!

Life brings us waves of energy experiences. Some of those waves are gentle, lapping at the shore of our lives, supporting our centeredness. The bigger waves pound the shore, encroaching on our space, while the occasional full on tsunami pull us out into a churning sea of energy that feels overwhelming. It is these tides that come in and encroach on our space, or pull us into their force that can make us forget our way back to center. We get so caught up in the energy around us and feeling its stressful, out-of-sorts vibration that we don’t access our tools for resetting our life and energetic boundaries.

I recently was caught up in a tsunami of energy, gale force winds colliding from several directions. During this time I was able to use my psychic tools for my clients, helping them see clearly, moving energy out of their space that wasn’t theirs, removing blocks to moving forward in their lives. But I lost touch with accessing these tools for myself. I noticed a specific area of my life where I had a block, but I was so triggered by this deep old belief, that I couldn’t break free. I’d been inconsistent in my daily practice of setting my intentions and was struggling when I tried to fully clean energy out of my aura that wasn’t mine or call my own scattered energy back to myself.

On a short trip away from home and vacation from work, I got enough space from the tsunami of energy that had engulfed me to break through and re-claim my center. It wasn’t easy, but I was determined to see this block. I called on my spiritual help, in the form of what I call my spiritual board of directors, a collective of supportive spiritual helpers, archangels and ascended masters. I asked them to bind the energy that was churned up in my life, preventing my clarity.

I asked to see clearly what my part was in allowing the disruptive energy into my life, what needed to heal or shift in me to re-claim my inner peace. I started by using the practices of clearing energy out of my aura that wasn’t serving me. Then I looked and listened for guidance. When it came it was so obvious, yet very hard to look at in myself; a sobering belief that was not serving me about others and myself. The belief was keeping a, supposedly safe distance between me and my most intimate relationship, really keeping me from getting hurt by getting too close emotionally.

I claimed my power to erase that belief system, requesting spiritual help in its release. The first step is seeing clearly, and then we have to claim our seniority to change our experience through intention and through action. Once this false belief was lifted the waves pounding on the shore of my life kept churning but I had my inner-peace and accessing my tools was no longer a challenge.

Maintaining my center in the face of waves that were pounding the shore of my life was easier when I returned home. Sometimes we need to give ourselves a little physical distance from the areas of our lives where the waves are encroaching. That physical distance, and assistance from our spiritual guides, provides the breathing room to reclaim our center.

In the morning I remember, by the afternoon I’ve forgotten, in the evening I remember again. How many times I can remember and forget the same spiritual lesson? It helps to have a good sense of humor about it. Spiritual lessons are generally simple yet profound. We “get it” in an Aha! moment of recognition and breathe a sigh of relief in the awareness. Suddenly we feel unstuck, clarity or an opening to new possibility.

When we learn a new spiritual lesson, it often feels like we are remembering something we’ve long forgotten because we are. We are tapping into a universal truth that puts our earthly interpretation of life experiences in a healthier perspective. But it is easy to forget what we know when we get pulled into the prevailing energies operating around us, from demands at work or home, to our own impatience or fears of what might happen.

A coworker at my technology job is spiraling into worry, fear, and what-if scenarios during a phone call and it tosses the rest of my day out of alignment. Instead of feeling proactive and peaceful as I go through my work day I feel off-center and behind. Not even aware of what hit me. A client calls with an “I need it now” demand and I forget to put it in perspective with the rest of my responsibilities. Only to find myself stressed out and behind trying to keep up with my prior commitments and complete the new request. I started the day out remembering and forgot. It takes a disruptive activity to remind me again such as a phone call from a friend or stepping outside to get lunch.

One of my spiritual lessons is “what is meant to be will be” or the Divine Plan is at work regardless of how it appears to me. It doesn’t mean I like it. I may feel sad, disappointed, disheartened or betrayed by God, confused, even angry. It is hardest to accept when what occurs feels like a loss. The unexpected death of a loved one, failure at something I’ve been working extremely diligently to accomplish, or struggling with something that seemed easy many times in the past. When we try every avenue only to have each lead to a dead-end, the Divine is sending us a message. Our path is elsewhere.

Another personal spiritual lesson that I frequently forget and remember is regarding manifesting what I desire. When I ask for something, if I can let go of how it arrives, (the timing and what form it takes) I’m more likely to notice when the prayer is answered. Demanding a certain form causes us to miss out on so many opportunities. It’s in a sense trying to control the choices of others and the Divine. When we set an intention with control energy, such as “please help my current job give me a more flexible schedule, better pay, a boss who I feel is a mentor,” we are failing to allow flexibility in how it arrives. The job that offers these things may not be our current job but a new job that is more aligned with the request. When that other job shows up, we ignore the offer because we are stuck wanting our current job to change and match our desire.

The primary energies I’ve noticed get in the way of remembering my spiritual truths when I need them most are the fears and expectations of others. Taking 10 minutes to get grounded and set my energy with a short meditation in the morning improves my odds of staying centered in the midst of all the energies that flow through my life in a day. Meditation tools can be applied liberally here to re-center after we get thrown off, but that’s presuming we remember when it happens!

Life surrounds us with constant stimulation of our senses. We need to make time to rest our psychic space in order to hear our intuition clearly. One way we can do this is through what I call daylight dreaming, a restful psychic state on the edge between sleep and wake, not fully conscious yet not asleep.

In this place our spirit is processing its experience. It is coming to new awareness of the energies in our vibrational field that are ready to be released or resolved. This is a restful state that brings healing, awareness and a sense of rejuvenation.

The visions that occur in daylight dreaming are like a slideshow of snapshots from our experiences. They have emotions associated with them: friendship, love, anxiety, anger, shame, joy, confusion, grief. As the scene drifts through our consciousness the unresolved energies take center stage. Often bringing to mind details we didn’t grasp in the moment of the experience.

In reviewing them from this restful place, they effortlessly begin to dissolve. We feel deeper relaxation in our body. We are still awake but our soul is actively directing the mind.

To access our inner-guidance this way starts with taking time to rest. We can simply lay down and close our eyes, engage in shavasana yoga practice or meditation. We encourage this state of daylight dreaming by resting when we are not physically tired but feel mentally overwhelmed.

Mediation to stimulate daylight dreaming:

Lay down with your eyes closed, quiet your mind.

Notice the places in your body that are tense and feel them relaxing.

Effortlessly visualize all the energy of your day before this moment, moving the images out of your body and into a bubble. Send that bubble to a faraway mountain top and pop it.

Notice your emotions, how you feel. There will be a dominate feeling and many other less dominate feelings all happening at the same time. For an emotion that is negative or energy depleting, notice where you feel it strongest in your physical body.

With your mind relaxed let whatever image comes emerge from your memory, this image will connect your emotion, the place where it is holding in your body and the experience which initiated or triggered the emotion.

Then imagine that energy being drawn out of your body into another bubble and send it off to a faraway place to recycle its energy with neutrality.

This can be repeated with the next layer of strongest emotion that surfaces in your daylight dream.

Daylight dreaming facilitates healing, a relaxation of the mind and release of spiritual energy in our aura field that isn’t serving us. Allowing ourselves to fulfill this essential need to rest the body and mind, restores us to a place of greater strength. Rest reduces stress and cultivates inner-peace. Resolving, releasing and healing our experiences bring greater clarity to our intuition.

Recently I found myself resisting asking the universe for what I wanted. As if outside of my life looking in, I knew that taking time to get clear on what I really wanted would benefit me. It would help me be more present and stay aligned with my truth. While self-reflecting on my resistance, I realized my inner-judgment toward asking for what I want.

Why was I hesitating? My analytical mind argued, “What if what I think I want isn’t in my highest good?” Or it took the position that I shouldn’t be as specific in my request, leaving it more open to the divine plan. But by avoiding getting clear I was undermining my power to manifest and subsequently my inner-peace.

Another aspect of my resistance was fear that God would see me as greedy for wanting more than what was needed for survival. I also worried that my desires would somehow unconsciously impact others in a negative or manipulative way. Overshadowing all of these judgmental thoughts was my fear of being disappointed. It felt risky to get my hopes up by asking for what I wanted.

Part of me could see the fallacy in all of these beliefs. But they felt real due to my social and religious programming. They were unconsciously blocking me.

Once I recognized them as false beliefs, I spent time in meditation looking at myself to identify, heal and release them. I noticed that I felt the tension of these beliefs in my body just below the belly button in my second chakra, the creation energy zone. Taking action to free myself of these blocks to creation, I visualized a bubble outside of my body, like a salve, drawing out the energies of judgment, control, fear, disappointment and unworthiness. When the bubble was full of these outdated beliefs, I imagined it floating to a faraway mountain top and popping. The energy was released to be recycled in the universe. Practicing meditations that clean-out false beliefs help us create space and remove resistance.

Here are a few of the benefits of setting intentions by visualizing what we would like to create in our life:

Focusing on areas in our life (relationship, career, home, money, health) long enough to get clear on what it is we are seeking to experience, aligns our energy with this vision, increasing our odds of attracting it!

Knowing what we want and need allows us to see more clearly when we are making choices, or feeling obligated to do things that aren’t in alignment with our values.

Being open to the form that our desires are fulfilled keeps us in gratitude.

The present moment is the only one where we have power to influence our larger life experience.

Manifestation is all about the feelings we want to experience in our life. When we get clear on what we want to feel in a relationship, in our home or at work, the form those experiences take or “how” things manifest isn’t as important. Removing resistance, those beliefs that we allow to block us from having what we want, gives us more clarity. Life flows, it takes less effort, when we are clear and in alignment with our needs and wants.

The lens we perceive all experiences through is colored by our past experiences. Beyond what has occurred for the body, mind and heart, the experiences of the Soul carry a memory that subconsciously imprints our present life. Our Akashic record is the term for the spiritual history of our Soul. To find complete healing we must release unresolved energy from our past to make space for a new reality.

The Akashic records contain all of the details of past experiences, from this life and previous lifetimes, whether we remember them or not. We each have a spiritual helper whose job is to maintain that record. The challenge is that the history of our Soul contains every detail of our past experience, some which were left unresolved or caused wounds that we may have healed psychologically but not spiritually.

The energy of these past unresolved experiences continues to be in our space, magnetically attracting similar experiences. We see this most clearly when we become aware of a pattern in our lives, such as choosing an abusive relationship. We have done the psychological work to heal that pattern, changed our behaviors that are associated with it, yet still find it showing up in our lives. Pretty frustrating!

Our Akashic record is a journal of our Soul’s experiences, from a neutral perspective, no judgment, simply a historical record. When we make choices in this life that lead to our healing we are creating the opportunity to change our experiences going forward. We release beliefs, patterns and wounds from the past and experience a new reality. In order to have complete healing, we have to address the Soul level as well as the mind, body and heart.

In the psychic realm we can look at the unresolved experiences from our past and communicate with the spirit keeper of the Akashic records to update them. If we ask, our Akashic record keeper will help us by maintaining the memory of the past experience that was unresolved while releasing the charge on the energy that is magnetically drawing matching experiences in from the universe.

Using our intuitive awareness we have the opportunity to see and clear past wounds for ourselves, releasing the vibration that is drawing in experiences we don’t want to repeat. Sometimes we are too close to clearly see our own wounds, or we can see them and don’t have the neutrality to heal them. It’s in these moments that we ask for outside assistance. Having a trusted teacher or healer see on our behalf and hold space for the shifting of energy.

The past is a fun place to explore when we can see the full-spectrum of experiences as part of what has made us who we are today. Past experiences mold our perspective and vision in the present. To reclaim our power to experience the life we want, we have to release ourselves from the unconscious grip of past wounds and belief systems that were based on a limited perspective. Working with our Akashic record keeper opens the door to a facet of healing that allows complete integration of our body, mind, heart and Soul’s experiences in the now.

The process of self-discovery is not a linear path. We become aware of an essential truth, something we are capable of, something we desire to hold in a prominent focus as we move forward in life and then somehow, often without even realizing it we get side tracked, thrown off course.

These meanderings in our process of living, feeling we’ve lost our Self for a while, aren’t for lack of setting intentions, making a commitment or willingness. The experiences always show up for a purpose. They are additional opportunities to get clear and hone-in on the pure vision of what we are creating with our lives. They may show us what we don’t want or they may show us more specifically what we do want. They definitly show us the areas where we are ready to grow.

Sometimes what we know we want is put on the back burner due to circumstances that feel out of our control, economic, family or other responsibilities. Other times it’s in response to a relationship or a group of people in our lives.

As an intuitive person the energies around us influence our feelings. What we manifest is rooted in our emotions toward something. So feelings are a critical factor in our creations. A partner or a social circle can work to awaken us in beautiful ways but can also pull us off track with their emotions or differing priorities.

When we feel another’s energy and respond to it, we are to varying degrees matching their vibration. I call this mirroring. Empathic intuition is one form of this. We sense the emotional energy and match it from the second chakra.

Without the conscious awareness of holding our own energy space we can get lost in mirroring through our empathy and not stay rooted in our Self. We make a better witness, and offer a sense of strength and grounding to others, when we have a clear awareness of what are our feelings versus the feelings of another. It is through mirroring or taking on the energy of our environment that we get thrown off course… if there really is such a thing… we are side tracked with an opportunity for new awareness.

To hold our course, the vision we want to create in our lives, we need to learn how to be present for others in a deeply feeling way while holding our presence for ourselves. We strengthen this ability by regularly meditating to refresh our sense of being grounded (first chakra), clear our energy field of energy that is not our own (sixth chakra) and call our energy back to fill us up.

There’s no need to be self-critical about the cycles of losing and finding our Self over and over again. Honestly, this process is what we are here for, to remember who we are at the very essence, heal, grow and to have experiences that help us see our truth more and more clearly each day.

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"Natalie has a grounded and loving way of guiding you to greater self-knowledge that assists you on your soul's journey. I experience profound 'ah-ha' moments during and after our sessions, as well as noticeable energetic shifts resulting in deeper peace and joy. She delivers spiritual insights and information with humor, kindness and compassion." -Jennifer